Support – Knowledge Base

Development plans for your Magento shop

Byte offers its customers discounted development plans of all the regular Hypernode plans for development and testing. These plans are meant to develop one webshop at the time, to run all the tests you can think of, and to give your customer (the shop-owner) access during development. Keep in mind though, these development plans cannot be used to go live with a shop.

What is a development plan?

A development plan is an exact copy of our regular Hypernode plans, with identical specs, features and cloudproviders. However, they are completely separate nodes allowing you to perform loadtests, try out Varnish or test different PHP-versions, all without affecting your production site.

The development plans come ready-to-go, including a Magento 1 installation. You don’t have to worry about web stacks, optimizations, libraries or New Relic agents. In addition, it’s easy to share the acceptance environment with customers. This allows the shop-owner to get a better idea of the store’s performance on the production environment. When you’re done developing you can convert to a regular production node at the click of a button in your Service Panel!

Limitations

We offer the development plans with a discount to help our customers set up a good development process. We can offer a discount because there’s no monitoring, no support outside of office hours and no historical back-ups. In this article you can read how to make back-ups yourself.

As a precaution all Google and Bing crawlers are blocked to prevent production usage of the node.

By default, all nodes are shielded using basic authentication, but you can add whitelisting IP addresses that are excluded from authenticating. This way services and or third party tools that can’t use basic authentication are still able to connect to the Hypernode.

Overriding basic authentication

To override a single IP from using basic authentication, you can whitelist this IP address by adding it to /data/web/nginx/whitelist-development-exception.conf.
This way you can easily test API connectivity, do load tests or run MageReport on your development node.

How to use MageReport on a development plan

Do you want to check a webshop on a development plan using MageReport? Add the username, the password and the domain name to the URL like this:
https://www.magereport.com/scan/?s=username:password@devdomainname.extension

The difference between a development plan and a staging environment

Your staging environment shares resources (disk, cpu, mem) with your production site. This means that it’s not possible to test different PHP-versions and when you do things such as automated load tests, your production site could be affected.

The difference between development plans and Vagrant

Vagrant is a tool that allows you to set up a virtual Hypernode for local development on your computer. In contrast to the development plans, the setup of Vagrant costs time and it’s not possible the share the acceptance environment with customers.

How to start?

Order a development plan on the Service Panel and start developing in no time! Do you already have a Magento shop you wish to import? Learn more about migrating it in this article.